View from Stalheim

Dahl painted this in 1842 from his home in Dresden, working up sketches he had made 16 years earlier on a walking tour of western Norway. He is often called the father of Norwegian landscape painting, and he built his country's mountains into a symbol at a time when Norway, only recently pulled out of Danish rule and tied instead to Sweden, was hungry for images of its own. The view looks down from the Stalheim heights into the narrow Naeroy valley in late-afternoon light, a small farm village catching the sun near the centre. A faint rainbow arcs across the peaks on the right, the one flourish he allowed himself in an otherwise closely observed scene.